NYU Professor Criticized Trigger Warnings. Now He's on Leave for the Semester.

University denies punishing him for expressing unpopular views.

New York University liberal studies professor Michael Rectenwald is on paid leave for the rest of the semester, and his vociferous criticisms of trigger warnings and far-left social justice activism may have something to do with it.

Back in September, Rectenwald created a Twitter account—Deplorable NYU Prof—in order to anonymously tweet attacks on PC culture.

"Why don't you go to a safe space and tend to your obvious psychic wounds?" he wrote, directing the question to "social justice warriors."

"The scariest thing about Halloween today is now the liberal totalitarian costume surveillance," he also observed (not incorrectly).

Last week, Rectenwald succumbed to temptation and outed himself in the pages of Washington Square News. He maintained that he was neither a sincere member of the alt-right, nor an actual Trump supporter. In fact, he described himself as a left communist:

I don't support Trump at all. I hate him — I think he's horrible. I'm hiding amongst the alt-right, alright? And the point is, this character is meant to exhibit and illustrate the notion that it's this crazy social-justice-warrior-knee-jerk-reaction-triggered-happy-safe-space-seeking-blah, blah, blah, blah culture that it's producing this alt-right. Now, I'm not dumb enough to go there. And my own politics are very strong — I'm a left communist. But I think that in fact, the crazier and crazier that this left gets, this version of the left, the more the more the alt-right is going to be laughing their asses off plus getting more pissed. Every time a speaker is booed off campus or shooed off campus because they might say something that bothers someone, that just feeds the notion that the left is totalitarian, and they have a point.

His comments quickly drew the attention of something called the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Group at NYU. The group published a letter critical of Rectenwald: it's members contended that he was guilty of "illogic and incivility."

And that's fine. Rectenwald gets to say what he thinks, and his critic get to say what they think.

But according to The New York Post, Rectenwald was also summoned to appear before his department head and an HR representative. He told The Post that the administrators accused him of having mental health problems and gave him no choice but to take a leave of absence.

A spokesperson for the university denied Rectenwald's account, telling the Gothamist that his leave was "voluntary."

"We look forward to having him back when he's ready," said the spokesperson.

I don't know whether Rectenwald embellished his tale of persecution, or whether NYU is being dishonest about punishing him. But it's concerning to see an academic complaining about safe space culture one moment and run off campus the next. Perhaps Rectenwald's exile is his own doing, but if the university permits no criticism of the regime of coddling its far-left students demand, it's just as illiberal as he claims.

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204 responses to “NYU Professor Criticized Trigger Warnings. Now He's on Leave for the Semester.”

Yes, we do teach people how to behave in a civil manner at NYU, and we take pride in it. For some further insight into the methods we use when necessary, see the documentation of America’s leading criminal “satire” case at:

So is this going to make this guy reconsider his “left communist” views? It sounds like he was starting to have some doubts already. Or will the self-criticism sessions and six months off to work on his “mental problems” be sufficient to return him to right-thinkingness?

When I interviewed Dyson in 1993, he expressed confidence that the quest for knowledge would never end, because knowledge is infinite.

Hmmm. I guess math is beautiful on its own? But, assuming a theory of everything is stumbled upon, I don’t know what the point of “more knowledge” would be (especially considering the premise, that the entire universe is essentially acting as a massive computer that can then calculate anything that it finds to be “interesting”). At some point, you’re just obsessing over knowing and memorizing the exact location of every particle in the universe, which is not really useful, although it is technically knowledge.

In his 1988 essay collection Infinite in All Directions, Dyson envisioned intelligence spreading through the entire universe, transforming it into a vast cosmic mind. “What will mind choose to do when it informs and controls the universe?”

Dyson then goes on to mention (to your point) what he thinks the problem may really be:

“Since we know the laws of physics are mathematical,” Dyson told me, “and we know that mathematics is an inconsistent system, it’s sort of plausible that physics will also be inconsistent” and therefore open-ended.

So the knowledge-seeking here is premised on the notion that physics is inconsistent. Maybe? And I’m probably way out of my intellectual depth here arguing with guys like Dyson, but that just doesn’t seem likely to me. An inconsistency in the underlying laws of physics would lead to inconsistent behavior of matter at some level. That’s a big can of worms.

An inconsistency in the underlying laws of physics would lead to inconsistent behavior of matter at some level.

But isn’t that true on the quantum level? Wave/ particle duality, discontinuous motion of particles at the quantum level, inconsistencies of probablity densities, etc.

I’m also a bit out of my depth when talking about quantum physics (engineers don’t deal with particles that small, as long as everything works on the Newtonian level we’re fine) but there’s a lot of inconsistent behavior of particles on the subatomic level.

I don’t think it is obviously true that knowledge is actually infinite and not just extremely vast. I also very much doubt that intelligent beings will ever know everything there is to know. And if quantum physics is correct, it’s impossible to know everything about the state of the universe anyway.

Calculating what the universe finds “interesting” is itself quite interesting. Certainly, just what it does and doesn’t keep track of is a fascinating subject, as shown by the multiple iterations of the double-slit experiment with various types of “quantum erasers”.

Getting side-tracked on the SA site and looking at their political articles. Their bias reads loud and clear.

I found the “what do the presidential candidates know about science” article interesting though. GayJay seems to have been added as an afterthought, yet generally gives the most cogent (surprising, really) arguments. Stein on the other hand comes across as someone who was put in stasis in 1920’s Russia and recently thawed back out.

The two mainstream candidates comes across as pandering and/or inscrutable.

“His comments quickly drew the attention of something called the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Group at NYU. The group published a letter critical of Rectenwald: it’s members contended that he was guilty of “illogic and incivility.”

And that’s fine. Rectenwald gets to say what he thinks, and his critic get to say what they think.

But according to The New York Post, Rectenwald was also summoned to appear before his department head and an HR representative. He told The Post that the administrators accused him of having mental health problems and gave him no choice but to take a leave of absence.”

This shit is straight out of the old USSR. How long before people are committed against their will for being anti-PC?

I can totally help with this! Buy an Elephant Ear Washer from Amazon. The best 15 bucks I ever spent. Seriously. It dislodged way more wax than I would have ever guessed was in there. It was insane. I took pictures. And my hearing afterwards was straight up superhuman.

In fact, Dr. Alexander seems to concede that my method isn’t totally insane: “What you’re doing is actually probably more effective than Q-tips because you’re emulating a common instrument ENTs use?a looped curette, which gets behind the wax and pulls it forward. You have the potential to slip the curve of the paperclip through and behind some of the wax, and when you pull forward you may get lucky and create a small hole that you’re able to hear through. The risk of infection, though, is still there, and you’re leaving most of the wax in place and potentially packing some of it in harder such that when someone does eventually need to remove it for you, it’s unpleasant for both of you.”

Sparky…is this you? (Yes, I remember your adventures with kidney stones and a paperclip).

That said, curettage for the inner ear canal, when *VERY* carefully done, can provide some really needed relief from the buildup of cerumen. I’ve done it myself (I used those plastic coated ones, gets a better grip), and much less abrasive than Q-Tips or a drawn Kleenex or something like that.

Didn’t you know, he’s just a brain in a jar. They keep advertising for ‘Interns’ because they need new neural tissue to repair the fissures in FoE. That’s why the last one was such a short deadling – he broke.

Well that’s ironic coming from the Democrats, known for sending brownshirts to their opponents rallies and having black supremacists stand ominously outside polling places under the de facto protection of the Democratic attorney general.

The Russians get everything almost right. Don’t worry, they will screw it up.

I remember reading about one of their chemical factories where they produced chlorine gas. The chamber where the chlorine was produced had a sealed door with a small window in it. Before anyone entered the chamber for maintenance they were supposed to peer through that window and look at a pair of lights on the opposite wall. A green light would light up if all of the gas was evacuated from the room and that meant it was safe to enter. The ‘not safe’ light was yellow.

Reality has again hit George Lindell, this time with a video of him chanting at a Donald Trump rally in Phoenix garnering multiple views, or going viral (in the parlance).

The Phoenix man spent Monday trying to explain why his chanting what sounded like “Jew-S-A” at the Saturday rally was not meant as a slur.

[…]

Some also have accused him of being a plant, a Hillary Clinton supporter paid to chant an epithet to paint Trump supporters in a negative light.

“Do I look like I got paid?” Lindell said.

He does not. He was sitting Monday in the sparse warehouse he uses for his painting business. It is also where he lives.

Lindell insists his chant was not a reference to the Jewish people or religion. He would not do that, he said. He would not denigrate an entire group of people.

“We’re all created equal,” he said. “We’re all different.”

Lindell said he has a rational explanation for his chant. What sounded like “Jew,” was in fact, he said, a chance to show allegiance with Spanish speakers who chant the country’s initials with a heavy accent.

Forced leave because mental health caused this fool to wrongthink…. these idiots are beyond parody. It’s like they are following a how to manual for totalitarianism. I wonder how long till one of suggests a camp where they can send all the mentally ill wrongthinkers, for their good.

What exactly is the Alt right. Clinton made up the term without definition and it has caught on. It is like radical conservative. One can be a right win radical, but then they are not conservative. Conservative is the opposite of radical. Alt right is what, leftist, the alternative of right?

Alt right is basically pan-European reactionary white nationalism. Sort of. Clinton didn’t make up the term, they’ve been slowly forming on the internet for some time. They’re basically ‘scientific racists’ who argue that there is a definite different between races and that whites should focus on their own in-group’s needs and restricting access to others. They also tend to argue that whites and/or sometimes East Asians are just naturally better at organizing societies. Hence Scandinavian socialism works while socialism in less white countries fail. They also believe that Jews are a foreign ethnic group that are trying to undermine the West with multiculturalism while maintaining their own monoculture. But there’s a lot of argument between them, some are fascists while others argue the only way to have a functional republic is to be vastly majority white, some argue that Christianity is the sole defining value system of the West while others see it as memetic Middle Eastern cancer that destroyed Germanic paganism.

I’m not sure it’s wrong to say that Europeans and East Asians have a better track record in building societies that prosper. I’m also not so sure that it’s wrong to say that democracy, and institutions in general, produce better results within higher IQ populations versus that of lower IQ populations. I’m also not so sure it’s wrong to say that certain ethnic groups tend to have higher IQ than others owing to genetic inheritance. If acknowledging uncomfortable truths is to be called “racism”. That kind of cheapens the pejorative nature of the term and strips away the negative connotations. Better to accept it for what it is without injecting these facts with value judgements that are meant to obscure truth while erstwhile diminishing the invalidity of actual racism.

You’d have a point, if alt-righters didn’t constantly claim the achievements of their fellow white man as collectively theirs and every act of degeneracy by a racial minority as proof of their race’s inferiority. When people furiously typing their opinions on the internet claim to be superior to a man who climbs Mount Kilimanjaro daily due to the colour of his skin I think it’s fair to call them racists.

Also, I’ve seen the reverse of this argument in afrocentricist circles, that white people historically are responsible for the majority of the world’s atrocities, therefore it’s reflective of an inherent aggression and murderous impulse in whites towards out-groups (based on Implicit Bias testing and some other stuff I’m too lazy to look up right now).

Not that I take that position seriously either, but I bet you’re unwilling to acknowledge that ‘uncomfortable truth’.

You bet that I’m unwilling to acknowledge that people often claim collective credit for individual accomplishments? What’s uncomfortable about acknowledging that that happens? Your scare quotes around the term are certainly interesting though. Almost as though you’re indignant that someone would cite facts which run counter to the radical egalitarianism that most people accept at face value.

You’d have a point, if alt-righters didn’t constantly claim the achievements of their fellow white man as collectively theirs and every act of degeneracy by a racial minority as proof of their race’s inferiority.

The irony is getting thick here. I would have a point if the alt-right didn’t (as a group) do X, Y and Z. So what’s all this nonsense about ascribing blame and credit to individuals for the actions purportedly taken by others?

Anyone that the progs hate. Right wing nationalists, militia members, Trump supporters, libertarians, you name it. It’s short hand for all the people who will rounded up and loaded into cattle cars or put against a wall and shot* when the revolution comes.

*The cattle cars are for people who can be re-educated. Libertarians are beyond hope of course, so we’ll just be put against the wall.

This is why Reason writers should never jump into the comments section. Gilmore’s comment was pretty innocuous by my observation, but it prompted a multi-comment text wall from ENB unnecessarily justifying herself. A columnist should not get that easily triggered by something so lame.

GILMORE’s criticism is valid, Red. I didn’t know about the rather glaring inconsistency myself until he brought it to my attention. I can see why he would mention it from time to time in relevant ENB posts where the inconsistency should be addressed.

It certainly didn’t help that the thesis of her diatribe consisted of, “Dude, that was like, two years ago!” She’s accountable for *anything* she writes, and just because, “JOURNALIST! EDITOR,” does not mean she gets a +2 Bubble of SJW Safe Space from critique. GIL also pointed out she has yet to write, verbatim, “Religious Folk (not just Christians) should have the right to choose their clientele just as much as any escort, prostitute, or web cam performer! They shouldn’t be compelled to participate in a ceremony any more than a hooker should be forced to service someone!”

If only my accountability, liability, and freedom from scrutiny was limited to such a short period of time (7 years in the State of OK, statute of limitation forever and ever, Amen.; 5 years in UKR, though a suit can be brought at any time for any reason, but is incredibly expensive to do so, but *must* meet rather high legal standards for malpractice).

I agree. Opinions are fluid and do change over time. Principles not so much.

It’s okay to once supporting something as specious as min. wage but so long as, to me anyway, you pen an article along the lines of ‘once upon a time minimum wage made sense to me. Now? Not so much. Here’s why…blah, blah’.

I don’t know if this is the case with ENB, I’m just sprouting ‘in general’.

Yeah I definitely don’t think Gilmore’s criticism was unwarranted. It’s nothing short of white knighting to impugn Gilmore for asking her to shore up the inconsistency of her rather negative stance regarding freedom of association that she penned a mere three years ago. Especially now that she writes almost daily articles about the absolute right of sex workers to enjoy freedom of association.

Oh, I’m sure it may have been–my main point was that paid columnists shouldn’t be wading into the comment section, especially over a relatively minor criticism, to write multiple posts re-explaining their position or their background. I know we enjoy it when they decide to drop something in now and again, but I doubt it would be all that awesome if they were posting with the level of saturation that, say, John employs on occasion.

my main point was that paid columnists shouldn’t be wading into the comment section, especially over a relatively minor criticism, to write multiple posts re-explaining their position or their background

Actually, I’m glad she did; I like to know a Highly Credentialed Journalist has biases and to where they engender the most sympathy. I found the confessional she belched forth to be extremely illuminating. And not to her credit either. I will definitely read her columns (which isn’t that often) with a much more sceptical eye. So, in that sense, it probably wasn’t wise to, “saturate,” as you say to the degree she did.

Otherwise, I do agree that interacting with us reprobates should be kept to a minimum. A little goes a long way.

Every time a speaker is booed off campus or shooed off campus because they might say something that bothers someone, that just feeds the notion that the left is totalitarian, and they have a point.

[Emphasis added]

I’m starting to wonder if maybe the modern left knows full well that they’re totalitarian and either just don’t care or actually want it that way. There’s no way that they can’t see that what they’re doing is totalitarian, unless they’re even dumber and more obtuse than anyone thought possible, so that must mean that they know full well what they’re doing and either don’t care about the consequences to the rest of society or they believe that they’ll have all the “deplorables” loaded onto cattle cars headed for the camps before anyone can stop them.

He told The Post that the administrators accused him of having mental health problems and gave him no choice but to take a leave of absence.

A spokesperson for the university denied Rectenwald’s account, telling the Gothamist that his leave was “voluntary.”

I’m pretty sure this is an “involuntary voluntary” leave of absence. It was probably strongly hinted that he should “voluntarily” take the semester off and his HR file probably shows that he’s on a voluntary sabbatical or something like that so that they have plausible deniability that he was forced to take leave, but anyone with half a brain should be able to see what’s going on here.

The left has always had its loonies, I gather, but when you look at the campus commies gathering together to scream epithets at strangers and losing their minds when they face any pushback whatsoever, and administrators happily indulging them, it seems pretty obvious what they want is a strong-man movement of brownshirts to beat down any opposition.

The DOJ is going to get really serious about this case now – by assigning John Podesta’s old law-school buddy / best-friend to look into the matter. it would be funny if I lived in a different banana republic.

Yeah, I saw that too. Funny how a guy who kept Podesta out of jail, by his own admission, when he straight-up perjured himself during the Lewinsky investigation is now in charge of this particular case.

It’s telling that the White House is the only Dem person or institution not completely shitting their pants about this. If Obama’s not sweating this, it’s because he’s been tipped off that 1) there’s nothing really important there, which is what we’ve suspected all along; or 2) that there’s nothing which implicates him directly.

Hillary apparently went on a 20-tweet meltdown yesterday crying about Trump’s ties to Russia. Someone needs to tell her that the 1950s called and they want their foreign policy back (and her in the kitchen where she belongs).

Really wish I could be there when these SJW’s gradutate: emerging from their safe space cocoon, undeserved sense of entitlement and worthless degree in hand, and then get blinded by the harsh light of the real world. Where will they run to then?

Actually, mix their undue entitlement with an inability to cope with the real world, and we’ll be paying them via “disability”. So maybe I don’t want to see it.

They’ll have jobs lined up in their Alma-maters “Office of Diversity and Inclulsion” or “Office of Title IX Compliance” or some shit. Some will end up in the private sector in HR departments pushing their horseshit into the real world. Enjoy the nightmare fuel.

“His comments quickly drew the attention of something called the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Group at NYU. The group published a letter critical of Rectenwald: it’s members contended that he was guilty of “illogic and incivility.””

Nary a day goes by that doesn’t contain at least one example of why Ayn Rand was brilliant.

He’s not being punished, he’s just been sent to the quiet corner to rethink his position and only return once he returns with the correct thinking. It’s standard “mandatory job training” is all, you guys…

until I looked at the paycheck saying $4730 , I did not believe that…my… brother woz like actualy bringing in money part time from there computar. . there friend brother started doing this for less than 7 months and resently paid for the morgage on there home and bought a new Cadillac …….

until I looked at the paycheck saying $4730 , I did not believe that…my… brother woz like actualy bringing in money part time from there computar. . there friend brother started doing this for less than 7 months and resently paid for the morgage on there home and bought a new Cadillac …….

until I looked at the paycheck saying $4730 , I did not believe that…my… brother woz like actualy bringing in money part time from there computar. . there friend brother started doing this for less than 7 months and resently paid for the morgage on there home and bought a new Cadillac …….

until I looked at the paycheck saying $4730 , I did not believe that…my… brother woz like actualy bringing in money part time from there computar. . there friend brother started doing this for less than 7 months and resently paid for the morgage on there home and bought a new Cadillac …….